FolkWest | Sunday Lineup | Home of the Four Corners Folk Festival

Anne and Pete Sibley - For Anne and Pete Sibley, it is the simplicity of the music: the words, the vocals, the harmonies. The storytelling and intimate nature of their original songs has drawn fans and encouraged the husband and wife duo to keep delivering. They aren't afraid of making music that is personal, paring it down, staying true to their instincts. Raised in New England singing in choirs, studying all types of music except folk and bluegrass, Anne and Pete stumbled upon their true calling when they moved west to Jackson Hole. They consider folk and bluegrass the people's music, nature's music, and they sing it freely and graciously. In April 2009, the Sibleys took top honors in the 'Great American Duet Sing-Off' on NPR's A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. This prestigious accolade has helped launch them onto the national music scene. Anne and Pete have recorded four well-received albums, including one for Christmas. They celebrated their newest release, Coming Home, in April 2009. Of the album Will You Walk With Me, music journal Bluegrass Now writes, "What emerges front and center are the couple's transcendent harmonies, vocal renditions that embellish already artful songwriting." CD Baby raves, "this duo is bound for greatness, with their stripped-down but stunning original songs and choice covers."

"One of the sweetest, most soulful and hauntingly beautiful duets in the business"
—Bluegrass Now Magazine

“Their harmonies are warm, tight and soulful; and their performances simple, poignant and unforgettable.”
—Nashville Public Radio

Caravan of Thieves create fun yet elegant compositions that embody the spirit and swing of early gypsy jazz but with plenty of witty, inventive lyrics and vocal harmonies to serenade the listener. Fiery violin arrangements, thumping upright bass and rhythmic acoustic guitar spanking counteract the sweet, melodic, harmonious male/female vocals of Fuzz and Carrie.
Within their first year together, Caravan of Thieves managed to win immediate praise for their new and unique brand of alt gypsy acoustic music and their theatrical high intensity show. During that time the quartet found themselves performing in premiere venues around the country with world renowned artists such as Dan Hicks, Tony Trischka, Tom Tom Club, Menudo, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Trout Fishing in America and Ryan Montbleau Band. Caravan successfully connected with audiences on each of these diverse and at times, odd fitting bills proving the music to be a hit with folk, pop, rock and jazz appreciators alike as well as all age groups. This became evident when in only ten months they went from support act to selling out their first headline show.

Also in that first year and in a fit of creativity, the group wrote, recorded and released their debut full length album, “Bouquet” featuring 12 original compositions. They worked with producer Keith "Touch" Saunders and mastering engineer, Joe Lambert (B-52’s, Bright Eyes, Animal Collective, R. Kelly) to achieve the ‘timeless’ sound they were envisioning and the recording also includes a guest appearance from accordion player Bruce Martin (Tom Tom Club). To accompany this collection of dramatic and comical short stories, they built an interactive stage set of percussive junk which delivers the audiences directly into the wild, imaginative minds of Fuzz and Carrie and the Caravan of Thieves.

Comprised of Fuzz and Carrie Sangiovanni, the singers and acoustic guitar players, Ben Dean the violinist and Brian Anderson the double bassist, this ragtag cast of characters converge from vastly different backgrounds in folk, pop, classical, jazz and rock. Fuzz (who has spent the past thirteen years touring the world with funk and dance groups such as Tom Tom Club and Deep Banana Blackout) teamed up with Carrie in 2004 to create an acoustic duo and their full band Rolla together. In those early years they developed their songwriting and vocal harmonizing skills together, released two records and played hundreds of shows around the country. As their vision developed, the couple knew they needed to expand their palette and in early 2008 recruited Brian, who had toured previously in his experimental jazz trio Raisin Hill as well as Ben who had studied jazz and classical violin since an early age and performed in a variety of ensembles, bands and orchestras around Connecticut.

Purveyors of the nu-folk, bluegrass movement, Crooked Still are equal parts ambassador and innovators as evidenced on their newest release Some Strange Country released on May 18th on Signature Sounds. The musical prowess of this defiantly non-traditional bluegrass quintet is on display as radically re-imagined traditional fare blends seamlessly alongside four original compositions and a surprising take on the Rolling Stones’ “You Got The Silver”.

For their fourth effort, Crooked Still were snowed into the studio with Grammy award winning producer and engineer Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss and Union Station, Tim O’Brien, Dolly Parton) in Charlottesville, Virginia. The isolation left little room for distraction and fueled more ambitious collaboration – quasi-orchestral string arrangements,
and unique vocal distortion techniques. Special guest vocalists include Ricky Skaggs, Tim O’Brien, Sarah Jarosz, and Annalisa Tornfelt.

On Some Strange Country, Crooked Still has honed in on their unique refraction of roots music, recording their most personal, visionary album yet. “The music is not just ‘alternative bluegrass’ or whatever people used to call it,” Brittany Haas remarks. “It’s at another level now: artful, but still grounded in that funky, string band thing.”

Some Strange Country is expansive yet intimate – a powerful document of five distinct musical voices working in concert to explore and redefine their relationship to tradition.

Back to schedule

Grammy Award winning multi-instrumentalist Sam Bush doesn't seem old enough to be a musical legend. And he's not. But he is.

Alternately known as the King of Telluride and the King of Newgrass, Bush has been honored by the Americana Music Association and the International Bluegrass Music Association.

"It's overwhelming and humbling," Bush says of his lifetime achievement award from the AMA. But honors are not what drive him. "I didn't get into music to win awards," he says. "I'm just now starting to get somewhere. I love to play and the older I get the more I love it. And I love new things."

Among those new things are the growing group of mandolin players that identify Bush as their musical role model in much the same way he idolized Bill Monroe and Jethro Burns. Bush has helped to expand the horizons of bluegrass music, fusing it with jazz, rock, blues, funk and other styles. He's the co-founder of the genre-bending New Grass Revival and an in-demand musician who has played with everyone from Emmylou Harris and Bela Fleck to Charlie Haden, Lyle Lovett and Garth Brooks. And though Bush is best known for jaw-dropping skills on the mandolin, he is also a three time national junior fiddle champion and Grammy award winning vocalist.

Circles Around Me, Bush's seventh solo album and sixth with Sugar Hill, is an aurally inspiring mix of bluegrass favorites and complementary new songs. "I don't know why, but it felt right at this moment in my life to go back and revisit some things that I've loved all my life, which is bluegrass and, unapologetically, newgrass," says Bush. "After all these years of experimenting —and there's experimentation on this record too —I've come full circle."

There's plenty more of course and Bush fans new and old will find lots to love.
"It's crazy to think about," Bush says of his influence on today's crop of mandolin players. "I'm proud to be part of a natural progression in music. And I hope to still be playing 30 years from now."

That said, it's not surprising that Bush still has goals. "I want to grow as a songwriter, as a song collaborator," he says. "There are still a lot of things I haven't discovered about playing mandolin. I want to be able to be secure in the styles that I know how to play well, but I also want to explore other styles that I haven't learned yet.

"As long as I'm alive I hope I have the ability to play," says Bush, a two time cancer treatment survivor. When the ability to play is taken away, it's humbling. It teaches you a lesson: don't take it for granted." Here's to the next 30 years.

Sarah Jarosz (juh-ROSE) has a fine, supple singing voice, occasionally reminiscent of such disparate artists as Natalie Maines, Patty Griffin, and Rickie Lee Jones. She has a deft writing voice, unusually assured and observant in her debut CD, Song Up In Her Head (Sugar Hill Records), and it is more than telling that the album's two covers (the Decemberists' "Shankill Butchers" and the Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan co-write, "Come On Up To The House") fit unobtrusively next to her own eleven songs. And of course she can play: mandolin, clawhammer banjo, guitar, and piano.

Born in Austin, Texas, in 1991 and raised in Wimberley, 45 minutes south and east of Austin's city limits, Jarosz began singing at two, playing piano at six, took up the mandolin at ten. Once I showed an interest in this music thing, my parents made it possible for me to be able to travel around the country and learn and grow as a musician."

It worked like this: For seven years Sarah has attended the week-long academy which precedes the RockyGrass festival in Lyons, Colorado. Last year she performed at the festival itself. "It's all just really built upon itself," she says of her career. "I feel like I've never had to push or force anything to make it happen. It's been a really beautiful, natural thing." Already she's played Telluride and Wintergrass, Old Settler's Music Festival in Austin, Grey Fox, and, even, the Country Music Association Festival. She joined Earl Scruggs and Ricky Skaggs on national television during the 2005 CMA salute to the father of bluegrass banjo, and was a special guest at the Del McCoury Band's 2008 New Year's Eve party at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

Solas offers a compellingly original, strikingly contemporary view of traditional Celtic sounds. Although Solas can play undiluted traditional Irish music as well as anyone alive or departed, the band is always varying the mix of fire-tested tradition and contemporary sensibility with an ease and naturalness that is as astonishing as their overwhelming musicianship. As a result, Solas transcends musical genres into the realm of pure musical expression that only a relative handful of musical artists attain. The internationally-acclaimed super group has not only captured the hearts and ears of Irish music fans, but fans all around the globe with their blend of Celtic traditional, folk and country melodies, bluesy -- sometimes jazz-inspired -- improvisations and global rhythms.

Since its birth in 1996, Solas has been loudly proclaimed as the most popular, influential, and exciting Celtic band to ever emerge from the United States. Even before the release of its first CD, the Boston Herald trumpeted the ensemble as “the first truly great Irish band to arise from America,” and the Irish Echo ranked Solas among the “most exciting bands anywhere in the world.” Since then, the praise has only grown louder. The Philadelphia Inquirer said they make “mind-blowing Irish folk music, maybe the world’s best.” The New York Times praised their “unbridled vitality“, the Washington Post dubbed them one of the “world’s finest Celtic-folk ensembles” and the Austin American-Statesman called them “the standard by which contemporary Celtic groups are judged.” Solas has built a fanbase that includes the likes of Bela Fleck, Emmylou Harris and the much sought-after rap producer Timbaland, who surprisingly sampled the band on his radio hit “All Yall.” Their latest release is The Turning Tide available on Compass Records.

The Solas sound today is anchored by founders Seamus Egan, who plays flute, tenor banjo, mandolin, whistle, guitar and bodhran, and fiddler Winifred Horan. They are two of the most respected—and imitated—musicians anywhere in acoustic music. Mick McAuley from Kilkenny plays accordion and concertina; Eamon McElholm from Tyrone plays guitar and keyboards.